Rapid integrated life cycle assessment of building-wide IT systems

An integrated life cycle environmental and cost analysis of building-wide IT systems was performed for the University of British Columbia´s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), a new green building currently under construction and scheduled for occupancy in summer 2011. Because the CIRS project has a mandate to choose environmentally preferable alternatives wherever possible, the CIRS team commissioned this study in order to enumerate possible technology systems to be installed and to assess them in terms of environmental performance, cost, and suitability for the building occupants. The team was particularly interested in investigating the possible environmental benefits of thin client computing devices, which replace desktops and laptops by hosting computing sessions on remote servers, and of all-wireless network systems which would obviate network cabling. Several potential building-wide IT systems were assessed, with each system comprising a different collection of products compatible with these high-level technology decisions. The analysis included production and use impacts based on studies in the Ecolnvent database; end-of-life was excluded because it represents a minimal share of the impact in these studies.